Stock photographs are expensive. Some professional photographers distribute their work under Creative Commons but if the license includes the Non-Commercial (NC) clause, you (the licensee) aren’t supposed to use their images on a for-profit website or one that has ads.

ImgEmbed is an online marketplace of photographs that offers a freemium option – you can embed any image on your website for free and and pay only if the impression count for that image exceeds 10,000.

ImgEmbed uses a pay-per-view (CPM) model and website owner need to pay anywhere between $1-$10 per 1,000 impressions (the price is set by the photograph owner) once they exceed the free quota of 10,000 impressions (per image).

To give you an example, this photograph of the New York city was found on ImgEmbed. There are no upfront costs for embedding the image and I will be charged $3 CPM only if this blog post becomes popular and crosses 10,000 page views, else the image is free.

Sell your Instagram, Flickr, Picasa and Facebook Photos

You can also sell your photographs of ImgEmbed and earn a fee when other websites or blogs choose to embed any of your photographs.

You can either upload photographs from your computer or the service can directly pull images that are hosted on your Instagram, Flickr, Facebook or Picasa albums. There are no charges for getting your photographs listed on the marketplace, you can set your own CPM pricing for images and ImgEmbed will take a flat 30% commission on the actual sales.

It is however important that you attach proper titles, descriptions and tags to your photos to improve discoverability. The images are hosted on ImgEmbed servers and the embed HTML code takes care of the attribution part while the photographers name is automatically added to the image.

ImgEmbed takes an innovate approach and promotes fair use of images online while offering creators, both amateurs and professionals, an opportunity to monetize their work.

That said, their catalog mostly offers medium-sized images – between 300-600 pixels – which may not be suitable for widescreen websites. Also, there are currently no filters to limit search results by color, size or even price.